For more than a decade, BetaNYC and the civic tech community have argued New York should build its own digital services, not just buy them. BetaNYC’s 2013 People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City called for permanent in-house technical teams inside city government. At BetaBagels 007 in 2021, then-Deputy CTO Katherine Benjamin made the same case.
In July 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and CTO Lisa Gelobter announced the PIT Crew, a new NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) initiative deploying five in-house teams of technologists alongside City agencies to build digital services instead of contracting them out.
On Tuesday, August 12, at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, we finally met the team leading that initiative. Deputy Commissioner Luke Farrell and Senior Product Manager Sukhi Gulati-Gilbert spoke to a room of civil servants, community members, students, and civic technologists about what the Public Interest Technology Crew (PIT Crew) is, what it’s building first, their hiring strategies, and how it plans to change what New Yorkers expect from city government online.
“It’s such an honor to be welcomed by a group of civic tech folks and community organizers who have worked for decades to make this work possible. We’re definitely standing on the shoulders of a lot of the work that people in this room have done.”
— Luke Farrell
What is the PIT Crew?
The PIT Crew is a small cross-functional team of product managers, researchers, designers, and software engineers inside OTI’s roughly 1,500-person agency. Its job is to build New Yorker-centered digital services in-house, iteratively, in partnership with the agencies that own the underlying programs.
Luke came to OTI after tours at the United States Digital Service and 18F, and was candid that USDS’s first iteration is as much a cautionary tale as an inspiration, noting that “a failure mode of past civic tech…like USDS in its first iteration, or 18F, was that new kids on the block were going to come, bust open your agency, and go fix it. That is not the intention here at all.”
The first job postings drew roughly 4,000 applications, signaling the appetite in New York for this work.
“Ultimately, pit crews are supportive…we want to be an accelerant to the existing things going on. How do we elevate and accelerate the important work already going on?”
— Sukhi Gulati-Gilbert
The first project: Click to Cancel
The PIT Crew’s inaugural build is a Click to Cancel complaint portal in partnership with the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP). It gives New Yorkers a straightforward way to report subscriptions they can’t cancel, and it exercises the model the team intends to use going forward: extend the agency’s existing stack, ship an end-to-end service in roughly a three-month cycle, and design the intake so DCWP can maintain it long after the PIT Crew moves on.
Three criteria drive what the team takes on:
- Public impact: does it touch a lot of New Yorkers, or a small group in a materially large way?
- Alignment: are the partner agency and City Hall ready to move on it?
- Complexity: can a small team ship a meaningful piece of it in a defined window?
Sukhi’s path, and why service design sits at the center
Sukhi shared how her career has run from Meta’s misinformation team, to MIT studying privacy legislation, to Consumer Reports, where she built the Permission Slip privacy app (later acquired by DeleteMe). What pulled her to OTI was the chance to work on responsible data stewardship inside the government that actually holds the data.
“Accessibility is not something we will compromise on. But the quality and joy of the experience is not something we want to compromise on either…we’re hoping to strike the right balance between meeting people where they are, making something that works for every single New Yorker, and changing people’s expectations of how software can feel to use.”
— Sukhi Gulati-Gilbert
That means treating every channel New Yorkers use to reach the city (311, email, in-person visits, search engines, and increasingly AI assistants) as a digital front door, and investing in each accordingly. 311, she noted, has been the city’s front door for two decades and hasn’t gotten the investment that role demands.
A PIT Crew, not a PIT Stop
Asked whether the PIT Crew would supplant existing civic tech capacity inside city government, Luke remarked that the metaphor is deliberate: a pit crew accelerates a car already on the track. NYC Opportunity, the Civic Service Design Studio, and internal IT teams inside partner agencies are the drivers.
“The intention of the pit crew is not to be a new organization that is going to run roughshod over existing organizations or take precedent over them. It’s very much our job to work with them, build with them, and learn from them as we do this work,” Luke said.
Two-year vision
Asked what success looks like in two years, Luke gave two answers. First, the team ships services that measurably move real numbers, like more money in New Yorkers’ pockets and higher enrollment in the programs they qualify for. Second, and harder: other agencies and other cities look at what the PIT Crew has built and adopt the model themselves.
“Instead of renting technology, actually building it ourselves in an accountable and sovereign way really is the path forward for the future of government.”
— Luke Farrell
Sukhi added a call to anyone in the audience considering government work: “Please, please apply to the Pit Crew. But also please apply to city government generally…we need good technologists and allies throughout the government.”
Watch the full session on YouTube
BetaBagels 016 — Meet the PIT Crew
A massive thank you to the Office of the Manhattan Borough President for hosting BetaBagels 016 and Esther Caroline for helping kick off the talk, as well as to Luke and Sukhi for the candid and warm conversation. Special thanks to OTI’s Gloria Chin and Andres Lopez-Ovejero for coming out.
BetaBagels is BetaNYC’s monthly breakfast series bringing New Yorkers, civil servants, and civic technologists into one room. Want to host or suggest a topic? Say hello at events@beta.nyc.